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Was in 7th grade. I had a year-round/track(A, B, C, D) school. I had no school during that month, so I was at home on that day. Woke up at around 6:30 AM PST(9:30 EST) to see it on the news. I can't exactly remember the time I woke up.... but by that time, the first plane already hit the towers.... (the Pentagon, and flight 93 hasn't happen yet.) Considering how I am in the west coast, all I could do was watch....

I was glued to the T.V. from morning until night time. I was hoping everyone in the towers were able to get out.... The images of people still hoping that their loved ones were safe, alive, or anything... The images of those loved ones still have yet to be found plastered in places around New York. The few people who survived through the rubble being rescued.... And of course the people like crews doing what they can for the situation, and many of them risking their lives/losing their lives because of it.

I think there may have been a plane or something going through my area in the middle of the night that day. Not sure what it was, but my only thought that day was that people from my city was going to be there to help out.

I was at home with my kids. They were watching cartoons when my friend called and told me to turn on the news. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. My now 17 year old daughter remembers being annoyed with me about changing the channel when she wanted to watch cartoons. I remember being worried about the price of gasoline going up.

Sometime later, I can't remember when, we went to visit DC and the Pentagon was still all torn up and they were repairing it.

Pretty crazy. Kind of like that Tom Clancy book.

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” ~ John Rogers

it is hubristic to judge people on how/why and over what they grieve. it is human nature to feel a bond with the culture in which we live or that is familiar. to deny these bonds exist is not logical - it's ignoring sociological reality.

devil flamingo - the language you chose to use to originally characterise the event does not sound like a feeler who has made an active choice to not care because their heart would break - it sounds like someone being cruelly flippant and attention seeking...i'm unconvinced by your rationale.

i was at university in australia when it happened. i can vividly remember them playing the footage of the planes being swallowed by the towers over and over. i was transfixed - i think because i had been in one of the towers when i was in nyc the year before.

it sparked fascinating political/legal debates at my university and i am grateful to have had that outlet to explore my thoughts on the issue at the time.

The process of grief to joy, joy to grief. fast track the mindset and remember the energy vibrates across the planet at the time of its action. and remains active in the hearts and minds of those affected most that need those aspects of healing to move wounds that exist as real manifestations if not more so than physical ones.

the reactivity of those expressions that dismiss the event are projecting their own pain against the backdrop of the conscious mind that relates to what happened. simply put events transpire and the mind hardly forgets and stores them in a subconscious circuit. sometimes whole life times, more. its a way of release.

Let time be healing and remember those events that matter.

Having said that while I wasn't there the event certainly affected me in Australia.
I was sitting in my flat at the time and the tv suddenly started to broadcast the events repeatedly and I was shocked at the crazy that just happened.
Then I got talking to the person who lived next to me and he seemed very neutral. His attitude disappointed me and I hardly said a thing. I then talked with my councilor and offered my best wishes, was hoping her family was okay that lived in the States and they were. It was an event of self destruction, a sad day whose energy lingers as a remembrance to the events that transpired.

I woke up to the radio, and they had just started to report that the Pentagon* was on fire. I went upstairs and told my mom and we turned on the TV minutes before live footage of Flight 175 crashing into the second tower came on. At that point i was so disturbed that i couldn't go to school. There was something about seeing something like that live, with no warning and when no one really knew exactly what was going on...i couldn't help but internally process the fear all those people must have felt. because if i was scared and confused sitting in my home in California then, well, what about the people standing on top of the WTC waiting for a rooftop rescue that would never come? All that Fi ate at 13 year old me.

9 years later and....well, the event itself doesn't disturb me so much anymore. Maybe i've grown number, if you will.

No, what gets me is exploitation of 9/11. For capitalism. For nationalism. For any -ism. to take feelings that are so strongly linked to such a tragedy and use them to gain something.

i take a moment to think about the losses today, but not any more than I would the ones in Rwanda, or Iraq, or anywhere else in the world. it's not that i don't care; i do. Just not any more than i would in any other situation on the same scale. I've had 9 years to see that day unfold and make its way into the bigger picture, and that makes things evolve over time I guess.

I am sure this has been done before but, do you remember what you were doing, where you were at? who you were with?

I'd like to her about you, BRMC. How it affected you. Only if you would like to share.

I sense this is now the battle of who can care less.

But, I found your pictures moving.

Of course I remember where I was. But its not so significant. Since you shared the pictures, BRMC, I'll share something based on another one of the striking images of that day. Something that speaks to me, an utter feeler with a weakness for essays.

Leap
By Brian Doyle

A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.

Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.

The mayor reported the mist.

A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes.

Tiffany Keeling saw fireballs falling that she later realized were people. Jennifer Griffin saw people falling and wept as she told the story. Niko Winstral saw people free-falling backwards with their hands out, like they were parachuting. Joe Duncan on his roof on Duane Street looked up and saw people jumping. Henry Weintraub saw people "leaping as they flew out." John Carson saw six people fall, "falling over themselves, falling, they were somersaulting." Steve Miller saw people jumping from a thousand feet in the air. Kirk Kjeldsen saw people flailing on the way down, people lining up and jumping, "too many people falling." Jane Tedder saw people leaping and the sight haunts her at night. Steve Tamas counted fourteen people jumping and then he stopped counting. Stuart DeHann saw one woman's dress billowing as she fell, and he saw a shirtless man falling end over end, and he too saw the couple leaping hand in hand.

Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.

But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the window holding hands.

I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell. Maybe they didn't even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped, and fell endlessly into the smoking canyon, at two hundred miles an hour, falling so far and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the pavement near Liberty Street so hard that there was a pink mist in the air.

I was at work. I often cruised the 'net at work (ABCNews.com). Around 8:50am, I noticed a few people hunched around a radio in my area. When I went online, I started to pick up reports on the Tower crashes. By 9:15am, I was just staring at the reports in shock, then hanging around the radio with other coworkers.

At about 10am, a coworker burst into hysterics and was taken outside by a friend, where she was bawling and wailing. it was a horrible sound. I found out later that her 20-something year old nephew who worked at the Pentagon had been killed in that crash.

I'm very intuitive/imaginative, and really good at projecting myself into someone else's head; this sucked because for the rest of that day (and a long time after) my mind would try to scramble into the eyes of the passengers, the people who worked in the towers, the firemen crushed in the collapse, etc., everyone who had been killed or maimed; my imagination wouldn't shut down, and I felt a lot of horrible things.

I left work early that day, in a daze, and stopped at Costco on the way home. Inside, they had an entire row of TVs set up to sell, and someone had turned on the news channel, so i was watching every TV screen in the place at the same time showing the same planes crashing into the towers. I was watching people leap from the buildings to their deaths 75 stories below, in multiview. It was horrible.

I went home to be with my kids. We went for a walk and talked about what happened, trying to explain it in a way that was helpful to them without needlessly scaring them. The schools were now trying to lock down security, in case other situations commenced aside from the plane terrorists. Later my spouse said some people from church growing up were on the one plane, the names had been announced on the news and the pictures shown, and yes it was them.

It just all really sucked, and I was just happy to be with my kids. Life felt like a very precious fragile thing. I felt like you just don't know what might happen, day to day, and you had to make each day count just in case.

"Hey Capa -- We're only stardust." ~ "Sunshine"

“Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty.” ~ H.P. Lovecraft

I'm very intuitive/imaginative, and really good at projecting myself into someone else's head; this sucked because for the rest of that day (and a long time after) my mind would try to scramble into the eyes of the passengers, the people who worked in the towers, the firemen crushed in the collapse, etc., everyone who had been killed or maimed; my imagination wouldn't shut down, and I felt a lot of horrible things.

Yeah, I was plagued by the idea of people being trapped inside the burning buildings, crushed and suffocated by the crumbling buildings, and falling debris. I couldn't get it out of my head for weeks. For some reason the images of the firemen bothered me the in the extreme - in fact, I just found out tonight that a group of 19 firemen who emerged from one truck all perished in trying to save the initial victims, and while they are only a few among hundreds and hundreds of rescue workers who died, it just symbolizes to me how entire small communities of people died that day.

I woke up to the radio, and they had just started to report that the Pentagon was on fire. I went upstairs and told my mom and we turned on the TV minutes before live footage of Flight 175 crashing into the second tower came on. At that point i was so disturbed that i couldn't go to school. There was something about seeing something like that live, with no warning and when no one really knew exactly what was going on...i couldn't help but internally process the fear all those people must have felt. because if i was scared and confused sitting in my home in California then, well, what about the people standing on top of the WTC waiting for a rooftop rescue that would never come? All that Fi ate at 13 year old me.

I'm curious about the time that you woke up (since you were in California that time.) When I woke up, nothing about the Pentagon was talked about just yet. I think the time that I woke up was when the second tower was already burning... 6:00-6:30AM I think I may have woke up right when the second plane crashed into the other WTC. All I can remember is that no footage of the second tower being hit by the second plane was shown just yet. But when the time came... the media just kept showing the second tower.

Sept. 11th was not a numbers game. Just under 3,000 dead is not a whole lot of people, no matter which way you slice it. It's not a body count, it's a bit count. The sheer amount of traumatizing footage, the speed at which it could be disseminated, how long it would take before it would stop repeating... It went on and on and on and on.

The most significant part of the Vietnam War was the footage. How would 9/11 be any different?

If a tree falls in a forest, we don't even know if it makes a sound. If it falls on a guy in Brooklyn, you'd better believe we know.